The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (18 page)

“My point, Dr. Goodweather,” said Dr. Kempner, “is that I can’t see much purpose in going any further.”

Eph turned to Nora, who looked up at him, understanding in an instant what he was going through.

“You can tell me it’s over,” Eph whispered into the phone. “But it’s not over, Dr. Kempner. It never will be.” And with that, he hung up.

He turned away, knowing Nora would respect him in this moment and not try to approach. And for that he was grateful, because there were tears in his eyes that he did not want her to see.

THE FIRST NIGHT

J
ust a few hours later, inside the basement morgue of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Manhattan, Dr. Bennett was finishing up after a very long day. He should have been exhausted, but in fact he was exhilarated. Something extraordinary was happening. It was as though the normally reliable rules of death and decomposition were being rewritten, right in this room. This shit went beyond established medicine, beyond human biology itself … perhaps even into the realm of the miraculous.

As planned, he had halted all autopsies for the night. Some work continued on other matters, the medico-legal investigators operating out of the cubicles upstairs, but the morgue was Bennett’s. He had noticed something during the CDC doctors’ visit, something about the blood sample he had drawn, the opalescent fluid he had collected in a specimen jar. He had stored it in the back of one of the specimen coolers, stashing it behind some glassware like the last good dessert inside a community refrigerator.

He unscrewed the cap and looked at it now, seated on a stool at the examination counter near the sink. After a few moments, the surface of the six or so ounces of white blood rippled, and Bennett shivered. He took a deep breath in order to collect himself. He thought about what to do, and then pulled an identical jar down from the shelf above. He
filled it with the same amount of water and set the jars down side by side. He needed to make certain that the disturbance was not the result of vibrations from a passing truck or some such.

He watched and waited.

There it was again. The viscous white fluid rippled—he saw it—while the considerably less dense water surface did not undulate at all.

Something was moving inside the blood sample.

Bennett thought for a moment. He poured the water down the sink drain, and then slowly poured the oily blood from one jar into the other. The fluid was syrupy and poured slowly but neatly. He saw nothing pass through the thin stream. The bottom of the first jar remained lightly coated with the white blood, but he saw nothing there.

He set the new jar down, and again he watched and waited.

He did not have to watch very long. The surface undulated and Bennett nearly leaped out of his stool.

He heard a noise behind him then, a scratching or a rustling sound. He turned, made jumpy by his discovery. Overhead lamps shone down on the empty stainless-steel tables behind him, every surface wiped down, the floor drains mopped clean. The Flight 753 victims locked away inside the walk-in cooler across the morgue.

Rats, maybe. There was nothing they could do to keep the vermin out of the building—and they had tried everything. In the walls. Or beneath the floor drains. He listened for a moment longer, then returned to the jar.

He poured the liquid from jar to jar again, this time stopping halfway. The amounts in each jar were roughly even. He set them underneath the overhead lamp and watched the milky surface for a sign of life.

There it was. In the first jar. A
plip
this time, almost like that of a small fish nibbling at the surface of a cloudy pond.

Bennett watched the other jar until he was satisfied, and then poured its contents down the drain. He then started over, again dividing the contents between the two glass vessels.

A siren in the street outside made him sit up. It passed, and in what should have been the ensuing silence, he heard sounds again. Movement-type sounds, behind him. Again he turned, feeling equal parts paranoid and foolish now. The room was empty, the morgue sterilized and still.

Yet … something was making that noise. He stood from his stool, silently, turning his head this way and that in order to get a fix on its source.

His divining directed his attention to the steel door of the walk-in refrigerator. He took a few steps toward it, all his senses attuned.

A rustling. A stirring. As though from inside. He had spent more than enough time down here not to be spooked by the mere proximity to the dead … but then he remembered the antemortem growth these corpses had exhibited. Clearly, these anxieties had prompted him to revert to the usual human taboos regarding the dead. Everything about his job flew in the face of normal human instinct. Cutting open corpses. Defiling cadavers, peeling faces back from skulls. Excising organs and flaying genitals. He smiled at himself in the empty room. So he was basically normal after all.

His mind playing tricks on him. Probably a glitch in the cooling fans or something. There was a safety switch inside the cooler, a big red button, in the event anyone ever got himself stuck in there accidentally.

He turned back to the jars. Watching them, waiting for more movement. He was wishing he had brought his laptop down in order to record his thoughts and impressions.

Plip.

He had been ready for it this time, his heart leaping but his body staying put. Still in the first jar. He poured out the other one and split the fluid a third time, approximately one ounce in each.

As he did this, he thought he saw something ride the spill from the first jar to the second. Something very thin, no more than an inch and a half in length—if indeed he saw what he thought he saw …

A worm. A fluke. Was this a parasitic disease? There were various examples of parasites reshaping hosts in order to serve their own reproductive aspects. Was this the explanation for the bizarre after-death changes he had seen on the autopsy table?

He held up the jar in question, swishing around the thinning white fluid underneath the lamplight. He eyed the contents carefully, closely … and yes … not once but twice, something slithered inside. Wriggled. Wire thin and as white as its surroundings, moving very fast.

Bennett had to isolate it. Dip it in formalin, and then study it, and identify it. If he had this one, he had dozens, maybe hundreds,
maybe … who knows how many, circulating inside the other bodies in the—

A sharp
bang
from the cooler shocked him, made him jerk up, jostling the jar from his hand. It fell to the counter, but did not shatter—bouncing instead, clattering into the sink, spilling and splattering its contents. Bennett let loose a string of obscenities, searching the stainless-steel basin for the worm. Then he felt warmth on the back of his left hand. Some of the white blood had spattered on him, and was now stinging his flesh. Not burning, but mildly caustic, enough to hurt. He quickly ran cold water over it and wiped it off on his lab coat before it could damage his skin.

He whirled around then, facing the cooler. The bang he had heard was certainly no electrical malfunction, but more like a wheeled stretcher banging into another wheeled stretcher. Impossible … and his ire rose again. His worm had just gone down the drain. He would get another blood sample, and isolate this parasite. This discovery was his.

Still wiping his hand on the flap of his jacket, he went to the door and pulled on the handle, releasing the chamber’s seal. A hiss of stale, refrigerated air breathed over him as the door opened wide.

J
oan Luss, after having released herself and the others from the isolation ward, hired a car to take her straight to the weekend home in New Canaan, Connecticut, of one of the founding partners of her law firm. She’d had the driver pull over twice so she could retch out the window. A combination of flu and nerves. But no matter. She was victim class and advocate now. Aggrieved party and crusading counselor. Fighting for restitution for the families of the dead and for the four fortunate survivors. The white-shoe firm of Camins, Peters, and Lilly could be looking at 40 percent of the largest corporate-claim payout ever, bigger than Vioxx, bigger even than WorldCom.

Joan Luss, partner.

You think you’re doing all right in Bronxville until you drive out into New Canaan. Bronxville, Joan’s home, is a leafy village in Westchester County, fifteen miles north of midtown Manhattan, twenty-eight minutes by Metro-North train. Roger Luss worked in international finance for Clume and Fairstein, and traveled out of the country most weeks.
Joan had traveled quite a bit, but had to pull back after the children were born, because it didn’t look good. But she missed it, and had thoroughly enjoyed her previous week in Berlin, at the Ritz-Carlton on the Potsdamer Platz. She and Roger, having grown so accustomed to hotel living, had emulated that very lifestyle in their home, with heated bathroom floors, a downstairs steam room, twice-weekly fresh flower deliveries, seven-day-a-week landscaping, and of course their housekeeper and laundress. Everything but turn-down service and a sweet on their pillows at night.

Buying into Bronxville several years before, with its lack of new construction and forbiddingly high tax rate, had been a big step up for them. But now, having had a taste of New Canaan—where lead partner Dory Camins lived like a feudal lord on a three-house estate complete with a fishing pond, horse stables, and an equestrian track—Bronxville, on her way back, had struck her as quaint, provincial, even a little … tired.

Now home, she had just awakened after suffering through a tremulous late-afternoon nap. Roger was still in Singapore, and she kept hearing noises in the house, noises that finally scared her awake. Restless anxiety. She attributed it to the meeting, perhaps the biggest meeting of her life.

Joan emerged from her study, holding the wall on her way downstairs, coming into the kitchen as Neeva, the children’s wonderful nanny, was clearing away the dinner mess, running a damp cloth over the table crumbs. “Oh, Neeva, I could have done that,” said Joan, not meaning a word of it, walking right to the tall glass cabinet where she kept their medicine. Neeva was a Haitian grandmother who lived in Yonkers, one town over. She was sixty-something, but looked basically ageless, always wearing a long ankle-length floral dress and comfortable Converse sneakers. Neeva was a much-needed calming influence in the Luss home. They were a busy bunch, what with Roger’s traveling and Joan’s long hours in the city and the children’s school and programs in between, everyone going in sixteen different directions. Neeva was the family rudder, and Joan’s secret weapon in keeping the household running right.

“Joan, you don’t look so good.”

“Joan” and “don’t” came out sounding like “Jon” and “don” in Neeva’s island lilt.

“Oh, I’m just a little run-down.” She popped some Motrin and two Flexerils and sat down at the kitchen island, opening
House Beautiful
.

“You should eat,” said Neeva.

“Hurts to swallow,” said Joan.

“Soup, then,” decreed Neeva, and set about getting it for her.

Neeva was a mother figure for all of them, not just the children. And why shouldn’t Joan have some mothering too? God knows, her real mother—twice divorced, living in an apartment in Hialeah, Florida—wasn’t up to the task. And the best part? When Neeva’s doting ways became too annoying, Joan could simply send her away on an errand with the kiddies. Best. Arrangement. Ever.

“I hear about that air-o-plane.” Neeva looked back at Joan from the can opener. “No good. An evil thing.”

Joan smiled at Neeva and her adorable little tropical superstitions—the smile cut abruptly short by a sharp pain in her jaw.

While the soup bowl rotated in the whirring microwave, Neeva came back to look at Joan, laying her roughened brown hand against Joan’s forehead, exploring the glandular region of Joan’s neck with gray-nailed fingers. Joan pulled back in pain.

“Swollen bad,” Neeva said.

Joan closed the magazine. “Maybe I should go back to bed.”

Neeva stood back, looking at her strangely. “You should go back to hospital.”

Joan would have laughed if she knew it wouldn’t hurt. Back to Queens? “Trust me, Neeva. I am much better off here in your hands. Besides—take it from one who knows. That whole hospital thing was an insurance ploy on the airline’s behalf. All for their benefit—not mine.”

As she rubbed her sore, swollen neck, Joan envisioned the impending lawsuit, and once again her spirits soared. She glanced around the kitchen. Funny how a house she had spent so much time and money redecorating and re-renovating could appear so suddenly … shabby.

Camins, Peters, Lilly …
and Luss
.

The children entered the kitchen then, Keene and Audrey, whining about some toy-related incident. Their voices worked their way inside Joan’s head such that she was seized by a commanding urge to backhand them each hard enough to send them flying halfway across the kitchen. But she managed to do what she always did, channeling her aggression toward her children into false enthusiasm, thrown up like
a wall around her angry self. She closed the magazine and raised her voice in order to silence theirs.

“How would you each like a pony, and your very own pond?”

She believed it was her generous bribe that had silenced the children, but it was in fact her smile, gargoylelike and glaring, baring an expression of utter hatred, that frightened them into stillness.

For Joan, the momentary silence was bliss.

T
he 911 call came in for a naked man at the Queens-Midtown Tunnel exits. The dispatch went out as a 10–50, a low-priority disorderly person call. A unit from the 1–7 arrived within eight minutes, and found a bad jam-up, worse than usual for a Sunday night. A few drivers honked and pointed them uptown. The suspect, they yelled, a fat guy wearing nothing but a red tag on his toe, had already moved on.

“I got kids here!” howled one guy in a dinged-up Dodge Caravan.